A Dog’s World, in Shadow

Slide Show|11 Photos

“Mondo Cane”

“Mondo Cane”

CreditThomas Roma/Howard Greenberg Gallery

Years ago, my parents and I started taking our family dog, a standard poodle named Tino, to the Dyker Dog Park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It was essentially a large, enclosed dirt space with some grass toward the back — by no means Prospect Park, but also without leash laws, so dogs could run free.

In the late afternoon one day, as my mother and I alternated throwing a tennis ball for Tino, my father noticed the shadows the dogs cast on the dirt — long and wild, startlingly unlike their physical forms. That’s how “Mondo Cane” — in Italian, “Dog World,” an idiom meaning something like “a world gone mad” — began.

For the next two years, my parents took Tino to the dog park a few times a week (I would go with them when I could) in the morning and late afternoon when the light cast the best shadows. Throughout the day, dogs of all sizes and breeds filtered in, sometimes by the dozen if they were brought by a dog walker, each barking manically, finally unleashed, and playing ravenously with one another. Over time, we came to know some of the owners, but all of the dogs, including, memorably, Violet, whom my dad would greet each morning with a sequence of wolflike howls, which she would match in harmony.

To take the pictures, my father mounted his camera to an eight-foot pole and operated the shutter through a long cable release. Armed with this contraption, he alternately looked like a shepherd, with the pole as his staff, and a madman, chasing the dogs around the park. “Landscapes with shadows” is how he describes the pictures, but they really look more like moonscapes, given the pocked and textured dirt surface.

“Mondo Cane” is simultaneously foreign and familiar in its depiction of its subjects. On one hand, the dogs look nothing like themselves in the pictures, distorted and featureless in their silhouettes. But on the other, they appear truer to their essential self, their primitive substance and oddly — given the misleading nature of the shadow in Plato’s cave allegory — closer to their Platonic form.

Looking through the pictures, one shadow wilder than the next, it’s hard not to come to view the canines’ shade as their spirit — an outward projection of how they see themselves for those precious hours when they’re off the leash at the park, self-actualizing. (Notably, in their obscured rendering, their collars disappear.) Some resemble fearsome wolves, some stoic water buffalo, and some a new breed of creature altogether, but never a pet, never the animal that will later sleep at the foot of your bed.

Last year, the parks department closed the dog park to lay down crushed stone. This ended the shooting for the project, as the shadows appeared more uniform on the gravel and lacked the interplay with the impressionable dirt. While the park is undoubtedly improved, a part of me can’t help but feel that those shadows the dogs cast in the morning light left imprints on the dirt — ones that are now covered up, buried like invisible fossils, with “Mondo Cane” their only record.

Giancarlo T. Roma is a writer and the son of Thomas Roma, the photographer whose work appears here.